This Is How It Always Is Audiobook by Laurie Frankel

Summary

When your youngest of five boys announces he wants to be a girl, there’s no parenting manual for what comes next – no chapter titled “How to Love Your Child When the World Isn’t Ready.” Laurie Frankel’s This Is How It Always Is plunges listeners into the chaotic, tender, and fiercely protective heart of the Walsh-Adams family as they navigate the uncharted territory of raising a transgender child. Based partly on Frankel’s own experience, this novel transforms what could be a headline into something far more powerful: a deeply human story about the secrets families keep and the truths children refuse to hide.

Audiobook Info

Author: Laurie Frankel
Narrator: Gabra Zackman
Duration: 12 hours and 47 minutes
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Release Date: June 6, 2017

Review

What sets This Is How It Always Is apart from other novels tackling gender identity is Frankel’s refusal to turn it into a single-issue story. Yes, Claude’s transition to Poppy is the emotional centerpiece, but the novel is equally concerned with the messy, glorious chaos of raising five boys, the strain that secrets place on a marriage, and the impossible calculus parents perform every day – weighing their child’s safety against their child’s truth. Frankel draws from her own life as the mother of a transgender child, and that authenticity permeates every scene. There’s no didacticism here, no after-school-special moralizing. Instead, there’s the raw, sometimes contradictory reality of parents who want desperately to do the right thing and aren’t always sure what that is.

Gabra Zackman delivers a narration that serves as the emotional backbone of this nearly thirteen-hour listening experience. She has an extraordinary ability to differentiate the sprawling Walsh-Adams household – from Penn’s wry, novelist-brain observations to Rosie’s fierce, surgeon-sharp protectiveness to the distinct voices of each of the five children. Where Zackman truly excels, however, is in the quieter moments: Claude’s soft-spoken wonder at discovering who Poppy really is, the loaded silences between husband and wife when they disagree about how much to reveal to the world, the barely contained heartbreak of a mother watching her child face cruelty for the first time. Zackman never oversells these moments, trusting the listener to feel their weight, and the result is a performance that feels intimate and deeply personal.

Frankel’s storytelling unfolds across years and even continents, as the family relocates from Wisconsin to Seattle, seeking a fresh start where Poppy can simply be Poppy without the baggage of everyone knowing her history. This sprawling timeline gives the novel a novelistic richness that rewards patient listening. The pacing is deliberately unhurried – some listeners may find certain stretches slow – but this measured approach mirrors the reality of how identity and acceptance develop: not in dramatic revelations, but in thousands of small, accumulating moments. A fairy tale that Penn writes for his children becomes a recurring motif, weaving through the narrative as a parallel story about transformation, and it’s one of the novel’s most inventive and emotionally resonant devices.

The novel also refuses to let any character off the hook. Rosie and Penn are loving, progressive parents, but they’re also flawed – keeping secrets from each other and from their children, sometimes prioritizing their own comfort over Poppy’s autonomy. The older brothers each respond to their sibling’s transition differently, and Frankel captures the full spectrum from protective solidarity to embarrassed confusion with remarkable honesty. Even the community reactions – the well-meaning neighbors, the hostile parents at school, the medical professionals navigating their own biases – feel three-dimensional rather than cartoonish. It’s this complexity that elevates the book from a topical novel to a lasting one.

If you’re a listener who gravitates toward literary fiction with emotional heft, if you’ve ever wrestled with the gap between who your family is in private and who they present to the world, or if you simply want to understand the transgender experience through a lens of empathy rather than politics, this audiobook will stay with you long after the final chapter. It’s also essential listening for parents – not just parents of transgender children, but any parent who has ever watched their child become someone they didn’t expect and had to decide, in real time, whether to hold on or let go.

Download & Listen

Experience the Walsh-Adams family’s unforgettable story of love, identity, and the courage it takes to let your child be exactly who they are. Download This Is How It Always Is audiobook at KTAudiobooks.com and settle in for nearly thirteen hours of deeply moving, beautifully narrated literary fiction that will challenge your assumptions and expand your heart.